Nowadays, the Internet arguably is the most useful technology due to its versatility. For example, the Internet provides access to news, information, email, chatting, social networking websites, job sites, online payment options, banking, downloading, blogs, videos, shopping and much more. The use of Internet has simplified our day-to-day activities. The global Information Technology (IT) user base is expanding rapidly, with a significant share comprising users with function limitation. The United Nation (UN) convention recognizes the importance of access to information as a basic human right and has set forth accessibility guidelines to access content available on the Internet. With increasing litigation and awareness, accessibility has become an increasingly critical issue for industries and government agencies.
Non-compliance with accessibility requirements for a website can lead to significant legal costs and have a detrimental effect on an organization's reputation and more importantly hampers equal opportunities to people with disability (Pwd). Further, a website accessible to people with disability also helps gain a competitive advantage in growing markets and increase revenue by widening the audience reach to the website thus increasing business and customer loyalty. To render any website or web based system accessible, designers need to comply with web accessibility standards and guidelines (WCAG 2.0) and respective laws and regulations of a country in which the website is accessible.
Since manual accessibility assessment is a laborious and extensive task, automated testing for accessibility assessment of webpage's is preferred. Even though automated testing has reduced efforts considerably, automated testing has certain limitations. For example, when the automated testing process claims that an accessibility guideline is being fulfilled this may in fact be inaccurate. For instance, in an exemplary webpage, if all images contain alt text then the automated testing results may report a pass for this guideline of the accessibility standard. But, in certain aspects, if the alt text isn't descriptive of its image, this clearly cannot be identified programmatically using automated testing, and thus, some degree of human judgment is required for accessibility testing. Hence there is a clear need to not rely on automated testing alone but to follow it up with manual testing and end user testing where human intelligence can play an important role.
Further, manual testing is classified into two subcategories namely using tools and using assistive technology tool such as screen readers.
The manual testing using tools is also referred as semi automated testing. The semi automated testing process makes use of tools such as accessibility toolbars and captures issues which need human judgment. In the process of manual testing, the tester would do a manual interpretation of different aspects of the tested webpage. The key activity involved in manual testing using accessibility toolbars is to verify navigation components, text equivalents, tables, ease in viewing content, colour contrast analyzer.
Further, the tools employed in a manual testing process include testing with Assistive technology tool(s) including for example Screen Reader. The process of manual testing using assistive technology tools like Screen Readers, Screen Magnifier, Dragon Naturally Speaking involves testing for support for text alternatives for non-text content and multimedia, keyboard operability, navigational mechanisms, information provided through presentation, sufficient time to use content, error handling, and readability of content. Behaviour of webpage's using different browsers, and screen readers' settings, preferences and interaction parameters are also validated using manual testing tools. Key activities in this process include user centered navigations, identifying operations, and testing is primarily done using the screen reader to do end user simulation and capture any criteria missed in the above validations. Tools employed for manual testing include screen readers such as ‘JAWS’ or ‘NVDA’.
Though these testing processes have certain advantages for webpage testing, it is difficult to determine which tool or a combination of tools should be used to test any particular checkpoint in order to gain maximum efficiency in the process of accessibility testing of a particular webpage.
Further, users with disabilities are engaged to test the webpage in the process of End User Acceptance Testing (UAT). This process involves, allowing the end user to interact with the webpage to check their experiences. Testing is done by end users having disabilities using various assistive technologies to capture specific access barriers and the overall user experience. Tools used in this phase involve assistive technologies tools such as Screen readers and Screen Magnifier.